Rust and Stardust

“Whenever technology companies complain that our broken world must be fixed, our initial impulse should be to ask: how do we know our world is broken in exactly the same way that Silicon Valley claims it is? What if the engineers are wrong and frustration, inconsistency, forgetting, perhaps even partisanship, are the very features that allow us to morph into the complex social actors that we are?”

I don’t agree completely but a worthwhile read!

heartuneasy:

if nobody will tell you you’re beautiful- you tell it to your own reflection in the mirror every single self-same day until you believe it. fake it: fake being happy, fake laughing deeply and frequently, fake being interested in the intricacies of your schoolwork and the intricacies of your peers’ lives, fake being responsible and skilled and brave until: you make it. if nobody will take your hand and show you the stars- you open an astrophysics textbook and you learn it yourself. if nobody will give you the world on a silver platter- you string the bow and you nock the arrow and you shoot the tiger right square in its silver throat. if nobody tells you you’re clever, you’re enough, you’re all mine- you belong to yourself and it’s time you recognized that is the greatest possible gift you’ve ever been given.

nobody will hold an umbrella over your head when it rains. nobody will carry your books for you. nobody will be the open lap upon which you rest your heavy head like an apple come finally to rest after its bizarre flight through the air from the drooping bent branch down a few feet to newton’s everlasting astonishment- so be it.

your hair is up in curlers. your leather boots are by the door. your succulents grow, quietly and on the windowsill, oblivious to your unspoken tragedy. you need to stop living like a puzzle piece in search of that other soggy spell-bound puzzle piece. you assemble yourself. you start small. a packet of sugar swiped from the diner. dust suspended in the air. your skin peeled back from your fingertips. a punch-in on the time-clock.

you have never let anybody in before this and you will not let anybody in now. you forgive yourself. your forgive your soft pounding organs and their gossamer-thin vulnerabilities. you forgive your jack-rabbit nerves. you forgive yourself for every single time you said you would do something and you didn’t. you forgive the fact that you always sleep late and that you always wake late and this crumpled-up feeling you’ve felt since fifteen: you forgive that too. just a hangover of an existential crisis. a small price to pay.

tomorrow you get up to overcast skies. tomorrow it is a blizzard outside and you are the vagabond. you are an angel. you are a devil. 

you breathe.